There can be no guarantee that a new, saner financial order will rise out of the ruins of the old, but there is a growing sense that the world is more open to such concepts as financial responsibility, accountability, fairness, stakeholder return and sustainability. There also is an uneasy sense that the financial credit crunch prefigures a much more profound ecological credit crunch, driven by demographic pressures, natural resource overload and climate change.
[This article has been reproduced with permission from Said Business School, University of Oxford. The article originally appeared in the School e-magazine, THEWORLD@OxfordSaid. http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk]